My Generation

Sometime last year an American academic contacted me on the basis of an article I wrote 10 years ago. It was a piece that emerged out of my honours thesis on Australian grunge literature. 

The academic was putting together a proposal for an edited collection on Generation X and I found myself agreeing to contribute a chapter that drew on that article, which was very much bound up with the generational debates of the 1990s.

In the proposed chapter, I'll also be mining my Master's thesis which continued examining those culture war debates but went beyond them to look at zines as a cultural form where young people were articulating their viewpoints, political and otherwise, alongside more culturally valued and influential media from which, the argument went, they were excluded.

While my chapter will concentrate on grunge and zines in Australia, I'm looking at them in a global context, not only because that's the purview of the proposed collection, but also because they're forms that are very much part of an international conversation, if, principally with other Western liberal democracies.

I'm taking some time to reacquaint myself with the issues of the day, borrowing books from the library, both fiction and non-fiction. 

As I began my search for sources, part of me was somewhat shocked to realise that I'd never read Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture.  If this is the author and book that had given my generation its name, it felt like I'd ignored a key artefact of my own history.  On the other hand, in Australia, it felt that much of the under-30s uptake of the literature by first time writers was a product of musical rather than literary tastes.

I am, of course, now compelled to visit Coupland's novel, so I've just begun reading it.  More anon.